Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too.

We recently slipped past the ten year anniversary of George Carlin’s death. I was reminded of his absence as the social and political discussion turned — briefly, tactically, disingenuously — to the concept of civility. Carlin famously went through several iterations in his long, duly venerated comedy career, but its his final chapters that deserve to still reverberate today. Although he never fully abandoned wordplay and making light of the mundane foibles that are the common denominator of most stand-ups, Carlin devoted increasing portions of his sets to caustic assessments of the state of the nation.

I used to have routines like “A Place for My Stuff” and “Baseball vs. Football” devoted to memory. And yet none of that sticks to my psyche with the same ferocity than a chunk of a larger piece called “Dumb Americans,” which was captured in his 2005 HBO Special, Life is Worth Losing. It’s class latter-day Carlin. He spends several minutes delivering mildly sophomoric lines directed at easy targets (there’s a lot of fat jokes in this stretch), before making a hard pivot into a brilliantly caustic explication of the strategic maneuvers of the U.S. power structure to keep the citizenry devoid of power.

“I’ll tell you what they don’t want,” Carlin says of the moneyed class exerting control over politicians and the media. “They don’t want a population of citizen capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interest in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest.”

Carlin continues on to name what the wealthy overlords actually want: “obedient workers.” I think about that particular piece of phrasing all the time. “Obedient workers.” As the media and politicians of all stripes again expend mortifying amounts of time and energy defending the supposedly persecuted members of the ruling class, with nary a thought for the workers at the modest Virginia restaurant who felt uncomfortable providing service to someone who’s regularly taken and advocated political stances that opportunistically painted them as less deserving of the basic rights and opportunities afforded U.S. citizens.

The word “civility” strikes me as synonymous with “obedience” in the current usage. In the few striking minutes that have been carved out the larger Carlin routine — dubbed “The American Dream” due to the wry, bleak punchline at the end — there is barely anything that can be called a joke, even if it occasionally follows the rough cadence of setup and payoff. There is, however, a whole lot of hard truth.

Previous entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Laughing Matters” tag.